The U.S. Gets Left Behind When It Comes to Working Women

Forbes Woman
I write about women, economics, politics, and where they all overlap.

The U.S. has lost its edge. A new paper from researchers Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn finds that while women made huge gains into the labor force since the 1970s, that growth has actually all but flatlined since the 1990s. Meanwhile, other countries have kept growing the number of women in their workforce, leaving us in the dust. In 1990, women’s participation rate in the labor force was 74 percent, ranking us at number six among 22 developed countries. But in the two intervening decades, we’ve only managed to bump that up to 75.2, while the other countries shot up from about 67 percent to nearly 80 percent. We now rank at 17 on the list. On top of all of this, the gap between the rate for men and women has only come down a few percentage points in the U.S., while it plummeted from nearly 30 points for the other countries to just 13. We have just not kept up in helping more women to enter the workforce.

This is a problem of our own making. The paper’s authors decided to examine what policy choices other countries had made over those 20 years to see if they might have had an impact, and oh did they. They looked at parental leave, the protection of part-time work, and public spending on child care. It will come as no surprise to any American working mom that we fall far behind on all three. The U.S. passed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993, mandating up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for those who had been at a company for a year that has over 50 employees. In contrast, other countries have generally mandated paid leave that is longer and have expanded it since the 90s. Five countries also took that time period to enact laws that give workers the right to demand a change to part-time, and 12 now have legislation forbidding discrimination against part-time workers. None of this exists for American workers. And last but not least, other countries increased their spending on child care faster than the U.S. over the past two decades, from .35 percent of GDP to .47 percent, while we spent .03 percent and have only brought that up to .11.

What’s the takeaway? The rest of the world has stayed dynamic and adapted to the increasingly female face of the workforce. The U.S., on the other hand, has stayed stuck. Our barely adequate policies of the 1990s have failed to keep up with women’s continuing desire to enter the workforce, which means we’re shooting ourselves in the female foot. Other countries took note of the fact that policies can no longer be modeled on June Cleaver greeting her husband and children at the end of the day with a meal and a smile. The U.S. still pretends that there is someone at home to care for the kids, even though wives stay home in less than a quarter of married-couple families.

What’s even clearer is that this failure to keep up with the times has a big impact on our workforce. By simulating what things would be like if the U.S. had similar polices to the rest of the developed world, the authors found that by now women’s labor force participation rate would be at 82 percent, a full 6.8 percentage points higher than current levels, which would bump us up to 11 in the rankings. Overall, the lack of these policies – paid parental leave, protections for part-time work, and spending on child care – can account for nearly 30 percent of the deterioration in women’s participation rate.

It’s not a perfect picture, though. The paper notes that there are some tradeoffs with some of these policies. Parental leave can have mixed results: on the one hand, giving parents the right to return to their jobs after leave makes it more likely that they’ll jump back in. But longer, paid leaves may encourage women to stay out for more time and may make companies view women as more expensive hires if they’re more likely to take leave. Similarly, it seems that women are more likely to work part-time in countries that protect that desire, as the gap between the women working part-time in the other countries and women doing the same here at home grew by two percentage points between 1990 and 2010. It only grew by less than a percentage point for men. The good news is that child care spending just seems to be a net gain, not having a big negative impact on women’s employment prospects.

Beyond more women taking part-time work in other countries, which can lower their earnings and career prospects, women in those countries also hold lower ranking positions. Women and men in the U.S. are just as likely to be managers, but in the rest of the developed world women are half as likely as men to be managers. Women are also more likely to be professionals here.

So the picture remains imperfect. It’s clear that the U.S. has been completely outpaced in policymaking that reflects the new gender make up of the workforce. But a cultural change still seems to lag across the globe. Parental leave is still something that seems to be the purview of women. Some countries are combating this by mandating that men take leave, and without that action the shift toward husbands taking leave along with their wives may be slow in coming. It seems clear that part-time work is still viewed negatively for career advancement. On top of this, women are majority of those changing their working schedules to accommodate children. We need a societal shift in which men are just as likely to go part-time so they can pick the kids up from school. The U.S. desperately needs to modernize our policies, but we all still need to change our cultural assumptions about the intersection of work and family.